Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  Nil drives along a deserted Grand Trunk Road and takes through Ashok Nagar reaching the Fence, beyond which lies Nothing, total, absolute, black Nothingness, and Nil runs along it until Siri suggests he turns left on Rajarhat Road. Then he pulls over. He shuts his eyes and puts his head back, enjoying the air conditioning and the slight vibration of the 7 Series with a V12 engine worth 2.5 million rupees.

  “Turn off the engine, think about the environment.”

  “The city is already a fucking forge,” goes Nil, eyes still closed. After a moment, though, he breathes out and reaches for the button. “You’re right,” he says. The docile Mercedes purrs to a still.

  “It looks like it’s a surprise for you every time.”

  “The pollution?”

  “No, that I’m right,” says the Crooked Woman. Nil laughs a little. She says, “It looks like it surprises you to know that things are actually going to hell, every day.”

  Nil says nothing.

  “Why are we here?” she asks after a while.

  Nil opens his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  The Crooked Woman points her bulbous nose at the building in front of which they are parked. “Why are we here?” she repeats.

  The Nil closes his eyes again. He lights a Benson. “I just wish that people were suffering a bit less. I would like to suffer a bit less. I would like to stop feeling like this.”

  “Cut it, Bukowski.”

  “I’m telling you,” Nil says, but can’t stop a hint of humor sneaking into his voice. “I’d like to go in there and get it over with this charade.”

  The Crooked Woman doesn’t sound amused. “If you want to do it, do it, Nil. You know how I feel about it.”

  Nil doesn’t move, his wrist resting on the steering wheel, the smoke filling the cabin like a ghost. “Do I, really?” he asks. He’s seeking reassurance and doesn’t try to hide it.

  “I want you to get better.”

  “Sometimes it feels like you’re keeping me from doing it... from going into that building, I mean.”

  “I’m keeping you?” She sounds offended. “And how, pray tell, could I possibly do that?”

  Nil takes a puff.

  “The truth is that,” says the Crooked Woman, “despite all your cursed-child-like paranoia, you really don’t want to do it. You want to live.”

  “No,” Nil corrects her. “I don’t want to die.”

  She laughs. “Do you even hear yourself? Damn it, when you do like this I swear you’re impossible.”

  Nil inhales and holds the smoke in his lungs and rests the cigarette hand on his thigh and then he lifts it back to his mouth and takes another drag and then another, and another.

  “I don’t like to fight with you, you know that.” The voice of the Crooked Woman is soft and maternal and Nil feels guilty, but it’s a sweet feeling at the same time, that which is born from having hurt someone who loves you. The Whole threatens to awaken in the depths of him.

  “So help me,” he snaps, his eyes wide. “Help me for real. I can’t carry this burden alone.” He wonders whether this is how Ferang feels, too.

  “I’m here by your side, forever, and you know that.” She’s playing along.

  Nil grins and sniffs and puts off the cigarette in the fifty thousand rupees Lalique ashtray he keeps in the car and bites the inside of his cheek till he tastes blood. “I have everything a man could want, money, property, power, a secured future ahead of me, but look at me, I’m drowning in self-pity.” Nil is having a hard time now making out what is dramatic make-believe and what are his real feeling.

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” she goes. “You have suffered a great wound, and healing takes time. Plus, you’re dead drunk tonight.”

  Nil ignores her last remark. “Three years,” he says, his heart racing at the memory. Is he playing a game of charades or is the game playing him?

  “All the time you need,” she says. “It’s your life that we’re talking about. Give yourself time, it will happen. Meanwhile, I’ll be right here.”

  “Maybe it’s time for me to move on.”

  “Says who? Certain events require attention and care to be assimilated. It takes time. I am here.”

  Nil grunts back. “I’ve waited too long.” He rubs his forehead and whispers, “I’m married.”

  “Your company is married. It doesn’t mean anything, you’re still free.”

  “I feel trapped—” The echo of Nil’s voice rambles in the cabin and fades between them.

  The Crooked Woman wraps her hands around her yellow kurti, her gaze tinged with confusion before and outrage after.

  “Say it, Nil.”

  Nil, his lips pressed together forming a slit, stares at the building before him.

  “Say it,” she says. “You’re thinking it, so you might as well spit it out.”

  “By you,” he says. “I feel trapped by you.”

  Silence.

  Nil blinks and turns to meet her gaze reflected in the window. “Wait,” he goes, regretting it, “let me explain.”

  “No need.”

  “Having you by my side is essential, it prevents me from slipping into darkness, you—you know that. But in this way we’ve been still, you know? Completely still, for three years.”

  “Then why are we here?” There is venom in her voice.

  Nil turns back to look at the building. “Good question.”

  “Don’t pull the philosopher with me. If it is as you say, why we are here and not in there already?”

  A beat.

  “Because you can’t bring yourself to do it,” she says. “That’s why.”

  “If I go out there now to deal with what I did—”

  The Crooked Woman takes his hand. “I will always be here, Nil,” she says, almost pleading now. “Always.”

  Nil can feel her touch but can’t see her hand. “You said that.”

  “And I repeat it.”

  Nil caresses her fingers with his thumb, on his lips a smile full of uncertainty. Her touch is so real it relieves the pain in his stomach. It always amazes him, how real she feels. “Maybe one of these nights I’ll do it.”

  “Don’t force yourself. Do only what you feel ready to do.”

  Nil lights another Benson and stares out of the window at the empty street. “I like it here, I guess.”

  The Crooked Woman giggles and lets go of his hand. Nil draws invisible lines on the window with his finger. Time passes. Nil can almost hear the Crooked Woman thinking, a clicking sound like a broken engine. Then she sighs.

  “Why do you like it?” she asks. Back she goes, ready to fight. “This is a shit part of the city, full of peasants, as you call them, so why do you—”

  “You know why.”

  “I want to hear you say it, Nil. If you want to play the-man-who’s-lived at least—”

  “Because it reminds me of you. Because of guilt.”

  “You see it, then?” Her voice is sweet again. She feels insane, or simply needy. “You’re still dealing with it, it’s not yet time for us to—”

  “Because of the lack of it,” he says, staring at the police station through the windshield. “I come here because I feel no guilt.”

  Silence falls and it is a leaden silence, pregnant with anger and loathing and neediness and fear, and it feels like when, after the explosion of a bomb, your eardrums fill with a whistle that nullifies all other sounds.

  “You didn’t really say that,” goes the Crooked Woman.

  This is the first time Nil hears her speaking with such contempt. His hands start trembling.

  “I think—”

  “Shut up,” she spits.

  Nil grabs the steering wheel to stop the trembling and shaking of his hands so hard that his fingers ache and he winces when a policeman appears outside the window, rising his fist as if to knock on it, but holding in mid-air instead, a faint smile on his lips, waiting for Nil to acknowledge his presence. Nil, still gazing ahead, counts to three and lowers the window
without looking at him.

  The policeman says something in Hindi.

  “No Hindi,” Nil interrupts him, flaunting a faux-American accent.

  “Sir, excuse me, sir,” says the cop in farmer English. “Maybe it’s better if you move the car, if you like, sir, please...”

  He talks and wobbles his head and the more Nil ignores him the more his body seems to shrink and his neck to collapse between his shoulders accentuating a couple of premature bacon rolls underneath his young-looking skin.

  Without a word, Nil pulls up the window.

  “I feel too much,” he says, turning toward the passenger seat. “It’s always been my curse. When I played with toy cars as a child I’d lay on the carpet contemplating the irremediable loneliness that characterizes human existence.”

  The Crooked Woman ignores him, tears streaming down her face. The policeman, at the corner of Nil’s eyes, hesitates for a few moments and walks back toward the building.

  “I’m sorry for what I said,” goes Nil in a pleading voice.

  “No,” she replies. “You’re sorry you said it.”

  Nil lights another Benson and the first drag tastes like gunpowder and he tries to put it off but the Crooked Woman catches his hand and brings the cigarette to her mouth and her lips are wrapped around the filter and Nil knows them well, and when she gives him back the cigarette, Nil can’t really say if the dampness on the filter is her saliva or if he just wants it to be.

  “I should feel guilty, I know that, but it’s not so, and I can’t help it.” Nil is back to studying the building. It is a low building, its plaster peeling off in patches beneath the tall windows, where humidity left brown and black stains. “I tried, I truly did, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I am.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “Nothing, I feel nothing. It’s like—”

  “You just complained about the course of feeling too much and so on.”

  “It’s complicated. It is the one and the other... at the same time. It’s complicated.”

  “You’re human, Nil.”

  “Do you understand now?”

  “I’ve understood since the beginning.”

  “Then why the anger?”

  The Crooked Woman traces the embroidery of her kurti with her fingernail. “Sometimes you have to look in the mirror to see what’s around you.”

  “And you’re my mirror?”

  “No, Nil,” she says, as if explaining something that needs no explanation. “I am your guilt.”

  This makes him smile. “Now who’s playing the philosopher?”

  They both laugh and the tension eases. Nil touches the touchscreen of the radio and scrolls down the playlist, lingering a moment with the index on the play button only to lower his hand again.

  “What is it?”

  “What if I’m the only one telling the truth?” he says after a moment of hesitation.

  “Nil...”

  “Wait, let me explain,” he says and turns to her. “Forget the movies and social media and the advertisements that people emulate—I always feel like I’m lying about this, about you and me. I mean, what if everyone else is unconsciously lying, and I am the only one to speak the truth?”

  “You sound like Ferang.”

  “Thanks.” Nil knows it’s not a compliment but rejoices anyway. Then he resumes, “What if human beings were unable to feel guilt, what if they could just feel the idea of it, the reflection of remorse projected upon them by the social consequences of their actions?”

  “Then Mel would be right. War and violence and abuse towards our fellow men and women would be the truest expressions of human nature, not a modern degeneration of it.” She pauses. “Or maybe you’re merely trying to justify what you did.”

  “In spite of what people like to believe, from this perspective then parting from our primitive stage, our natural stage, maybe is not all that wrong...”

  “So maybe what you did is right, maybe it’s the evolution of the species.”

  “No, wait—I didn’t say that.”

  “And why not, Nil? Let’s embrace the truth that we are all beasts inside, that our only value is the gratification of ourselves at the expense of others.”

  “No, I mean—” he stutters, “I know what I did was wrong, but... even now when I think about it... this mixture of emotions—shame, fear—”

  “Anger, satisfaction—”

  “Yeah,” he says, carried away, “and where there should be guilt, there is a hole. It doesn’t expand or shrinks, it’s simply there, empty, silent, impossible to ignore.”

  “It has always been there.”

  “Probably it was there long before I—”

  “No.”

  He tries to meet her eyes. She looks away. “Before I—”

  “Nil, please.”

  “I have to say it, maybe we just need to—”

  “Turn on the engine.”

  “I’m losing it if I do not say it out loud.”

  “Turn on the engine.”

  “Before the day you—”

  “Go. Go!”

  “How does it feel to have a dick in—”

  The Crooked Woman arches her back and a guttural warble fills her throat, and her throat is tense and swollen and crossed by thick veins, and her arms fold back and hit the seat, and Nil jumps and guns the engine without removing the hand brake and so the Mercedes leaps forward only to stop with a jerk, and the Crooked Woman opens her legs and her lips wide and Nil tries to restart the car but he can’t take his eyes off her and the Benson packet slips out of his pocket and the cigarettes scatter on the mat around his feet, and Nil doesn’t know what to do except fix his eyes on the police station in front to him and listen to the Crooked Woman panting like a bitch in heat, just like three years ago.

  The Crooked Woman trembles. She trembles and comes.

  Nil has an erection and his heart is racing and despite the mad trembling of his hands he starts the engine and drives, feeling her gaze on himself, and he knows that the Crooked Woman is smiling at him.

  Moving away from the police station, Nil keeps his thighs shut to hide his sex. He drives home and his hands shake and his vision is at times blurred and in the underground parking, by seeing the driver in the exact place where he left him, he feels the Whole rise within himself and has to suppress the urge to run him over and crush him against the concrete pillar behind him.

  The hall of the building is clean and hearteningly well lit but the absence of the doorman in his cabin fills him with anger, and Nil leans over to look inside the cabin but there is Nobody there. In the corridor in front of his apartment he does all he can not to look at Kamat’s door but his silent peephole is looking at him and he gets his own entry code wrong twice before hearing the familiar sound of the lock clicking open and so he slips inside and, taking only his shoes off, gets to the master bedroom and hits the hay as he is.

  His erection is violent and prevents him from sleeping.

  Nil gets up and is covered in sweat and orders Siri to play “The Mighty Rio Grande” by This Will Destroy You. The music fills the apartment.

  In the living room, looking for the bottle of Old Monk, Nil finds it empty and so he steps into the kitchen and opens a bottle of Writer’s Tears, but having lost all feeling in his fingertips, he drops it—and the bottle shatters on the ground with an apocalyptic roar. He opens a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and the taste of it punctures his cerebral cortex and is disgusting but Wiz Khalifa likes so he must drink. He downs three glasses, but it’s not enough, and that’s when he remembers about the dope, Mel’s dope, the packet she gifted him.

  Nil delves into the dirty laundry basket in the bathroom and gagging he curses the maid for no good reason and when the floor is covered with clothes he remembers that the coke is in the pocket of the shirt he’s wearing. Acknowledging the physical proximity to it makes him feel better.

  Within an hour, Nil’s done the entire packet.

  Trying to trick his own s
harpened senses, he gets back to bed reading Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe and goes through it letting the paragraphs flow through him with the steadiness of a waterfall splashing into the depths of a gorge, and so he reads the story of a brother who comes back to life and a father who get younger the more he drinks and a mother with this innate business acumen that only makes her poorer, and then he realizes he has been reading the book in reverse, starting from the end and flipping toward the beginning, but the story still makes sense to him, and there is no doubt about it, objects in the mirror are closer than they appear while his erect sex gives him no peace.

  ***

  Nil is in college and has no idea how he got here, and is wearing clean clothes except for his underwear, which feels heavy and warm around the rigidity of his member, and then he wakes up, and he’s in the classroom, and the lecturer, an American female in her thirties, is telling an anecdote regarding her career in politics. At first she looks like Hillary Clinton, but it’s not really her. No, of course not.

  After class he’s walking in the hallways listening to the rhythm of his blood pounding inside his temples, and as he looks for Mel he stumbles upon something but when he turns he sees Nobody and there is no trace of Mel, and the Whole is swelling within him. Nil can’t do anything but call an Uber and get to the most exclusive Gymkhana in Ayodhya, of which his family is a lifelong member, where he lunches on roasted pomfret washing it down with some champagne and concluding with a cigar imported from Cuba, and he feels better and feels lonely, and this makes him feel good.

  Relaxing on a chaise-longue, reading a copy of the Express and, knowing he won’t find anything about the Mafia or the drought or the drug dealing, he right away opens the sports section, skipping the cricket pages, and only by chance a short article on page thirty-six catches his attention.

  By four o’clock, after a massage with Vietnamese oils, Nil gets back to the University right in time for the end of classes and, for some reason that escapes him, feels the need to tell the driver that he attended the whole day before he asks him to drive him to Candle Cove, the Express in his hand.

  “Here,” he goes sitting at their table, opening the newspaper to page thirty-six.

  A song all bass and electric guitar fills the bar, and the waiter, tongue protruding on upper lip, is cleaning to the floor with enthusiasm, and the Smoking Woman is smoking and contemplating the wall in front of her, and the light is more intense around her but dims down and fades in the corners of the room.